Reducing disaster risks

Mountain lakes and marshes reduce peak flooding. Mangroves reduce the impacts of tsunamis, hurricanes and storms. And in arid regions wetlands are life-savers during extreme droughts. Natural and man-made disasters affect millions of vulnerable people in the world.
It is our aim to ensure that natural ecosystem based solutions are integrated in disaster risk reduction (DRR) plans.

The impacts of natural and man-made disasters are expected to increase not only due to climate related extreme weather, but also due to the loss of wetlands and forests. The vital role of ecosystems is however hardly taken into account in DRR. We have therefore made ‘ecosystem smart disaster risk reduction’ a core focus of our work. We demonstrate that sustaining and restoring wetlands is a cost-effective strategy for DRR and climate change adaptation, with strong benefits for poverty reduction and biodiversity conservation.

Partnership with humanitarian sector

Our first priority is to collaborate with humanitarian organisations and other decision-makers to integrate ecosystem and landscape based approaches into their disaster risk efforts. Since three years we have therefore joined forces with CARE, Cordaid, the Red Cross and the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre (Partners for Resilience alliance). Together we run a programme that spans nine countries across three continents to strenghten community resilience, empowering civil society and policy dialogue. See http://www.partnersforresilience.nl/ for more information. View our joint publications:

We also joined PEDRR, a global alliance of UN agencies, NGOs and specialist institutes which plays a vital role in steering DRR Action frameworks and global activities on reducing the risk of disasters. Read more.

Long term projects in mountain, coastal and arid regions

Wetlands International conducts long-term projects in mountain, arid and coastal areas where we aim to: